Donald's Blog

This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dcmusicbox@earthlink.net.

November 1, 2016

Bernard Levin (1928-2004)

I am reading Bernard Levin's "The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties", his first book, published in 1970; I am only 75 pages into a 435-page book, and when I have to put it down I can hardly wait to get back and read another page. Why should that be so? I remember perfectly well that Christine Keeler was pretty enough so that any man might have jumped into bed with her, that Lord Denning was a pompous ass, that there were so many conspiracy theories that one couldn't keep track, and so on, and so forth; why should I wish to read about it all now? Because Levin's sentences are like a pile of cartoon serpents, slithering in and out with fiendish glee on their reptilian faces and a sting in each tail, leaving me wondering, with the Greatest Writer, What fools these mortals be.

And how unfair it was that Bernard Levin (1928-2004) should have suffered his last decade from Alzheimer's disease. Never was such a fate less deserved.

My Grandpa Schultz was a wonderful old coot. He wasn't my real grandpa -- he was my grandma's second husband -- but my brother and I loved him, and he loved us. He never went past the fourth grade, but he was a good farmer; he truly loved the land, and watching things grow. He was so tight that when he took a nickel out of his pocket Jefferson blinked at the light; but when I cried when I was a little kid because I wanted a toy and he wouldn't buy it for me, that was not just because he was cheap: he was trying to teach me that you can't always have everything you want. But he puzzled me when I was about ten years old. We were doing something or other together in the garage or on the farm, when he told me that he resented having to pay taxes to support the public schools, since he didn't have any kids of his own. Looking back now, I suppose what he meant was that that should have been my parents' responsibility, not his. But even at the age of ten, I thought that attitude was kind of weird. I am a democratic socialist. Like most Americans, I love my public schools, my Social Security, my Medicare, my United States Post Office (which knit the country together in its early years), and my group health care plans, Blue Cross and the rest. The principle is that everybody pays in because everybody benefits: even if you rarely mail a letter or go to the doctor, and have no children to send to school, you benefit from living in a literate, civilized country, where health care is there if you need it. (The reason Obamacare is a ragbag that nobody likes is because we can't get what we need and want, which is national group health care, like every other modern nation has.) A letter-writer in the Wall Street Journal was worried about "Virtual government ownership of the means of production [and] lack of private ownership", which is nonsense. Democratic socialism is what makes the American way of life possible, no more a threat to it than was domestic communism during the paranoid 1950s, when everybody knew that the Soviet Union was a place where you had to stand in line to buy toothpaste and toilet paper; anybody who thought that the USA was ever going to go that way was a nut case, but our spineless politicians bent over backward to be more anti-communist than the next guy. There is, however, something that so-called American "conservatives" are right about, from the Koch brothers to the tea party types. Bureaucracy grows, like a cancer; new laws are passed on top of old laws, which were passed on top of still older laws, and few of them are ever repealed. To be sure, folks like the Koch brothers want the rules changed to suit themselves, but the fact is that the government is too big, too expensive, too inefficient, and even though it is inefficient it is too intrusive. I am certainly going to vote for Hillary Clinton in November, but I agree with Paul Berman in Tablet: "I wish she would come up with something grander than a laundry-list of social reform." If we can set ourselves free from ourselves we will became more prosperous, and many of the social reforms will take care of themselves. Senator Clinton needs to make specific policy proposals that make sense. Yes, we need to regulate Wall Street and the big banks and the big corporations, but once the regulations are in place, we need to get the hell out of the way and let them create prosperity. Dodd-Frank had its heart in the right place, but it should have been 100 pages long, not 2300 pages, to say nothing of 26,000 pages of rules. Start-ups are discouraged and new jobs not created because of the hassle and expense of doing anything at all. Privatise Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. Regulate the lending business, but get the government out of the actual lending. Trade is good, the more of it the better. What is wrong with the Trans-Pacific Partnership? I have heard that it gives too much power to multinational corporations; no doubt it needs to be tweaked. Can we hear some specific ideas, as opposed to knee-jerk slogans? And meanwhile, why do we persuade multinational corporations not to bring their overseas profits home, by threatening to tax them on profits which have already been taxed overseas? We need real tax reform, and we need specific proposals, not "I'll raise someone else's taxes, not yours." Don't pretend that corporations pay high taxes; rather, lower the taxes and cut out the loopholes. Start phasing out agricultural subsidies. We needed them 80 years ago, but now we don't. We protect American sugar and subsidise American corn, which is why much of our food and drink contains high-fructose corn syrup, basically an industrial chemical that tastes metallic. It is the reason why the Midwest is now a monoculture, which is dangerous; it is the reason why ethanol is made from corn, which is simply foolish. And why do we support the growing of rice, a water-intensive crop, in California, which is a desert? We can't even export it to Asia, because it's the wrong kind of rice. Start to shrink the education department, and give the responsibility for K-12 education back to the states. If Texas wants to distribute textbooks full of superstition, some teachers will teach around that, and sooner or later parents will demand better books. Or they won't. Parents will start to insist that their kids get their noses out of their smartphones and learn something. Or they won't. There's nothing Washington can do about any of this. (But continue to enable local community colleges and vocational schools. I have an honors degree in education; with that and two bucks I can get a coffee at Starbucks: I am glad I went to university, but nobody needs to go to university.) The Environmental Protection Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities Exchange Commission and a great many other government agencies (employing tens of thousands of bureaucrats) need to be got under control. A 200-year-old antique piano was destroyed by customs when the pianist tried to bring it back from overseas, because it had ivory keys. In August 2011 Federal paramilitaries wearing body armor and machine guns raided a guitar factory in Nashville. Lawsuits against Wall Street bigshots go nowhere, while the real sellers of worthless mortgages have disappeared back into the woodwork. If a pressure group obviously pushing an agenda is outraged at being audited, the solution is simple: abolish most of the tax-exempt categories; let the pressure groups (and the mega-churches) pay taxes like everyone else. We have nothing to fear except fear itself, a famous man once said, but the nation is desperately afraid of stupid. I could go on, and some of these ideas will be debated, but if Hillary would make sensible, positive, specific proposals in every area of national life, she would get independents, Republicans and libertarians voting for her, the jackass who is her opponent would not carry a single state, and we could all start to breathe again.

July 25, 2016

Goodish news

So Roger Ailes has left Fox News. That's the best news we've had since Antonin Scalia dropped dead.

I learned everything I needed to know about Fox News shortly after coming back to the USA after 25 years in England. I went to work for Barnes & Noble in 1998, and a customer asked me for a book by Bill O'Reilly. I fetched the book for him, and the author's name was vaguely familiar, so I asked,"Who's Bill O'Reilly, then? A talking head on TV?" "Yeah, he's got a kind of political talk show on Fox..."

After the customer left, I went to the shelf to look at the book myself, because I thought the title, The No Spin Zone, was a clever one. I opened the book at random, started reading a couple of paragraphs, and burst out laughing. It was nothing but spin!

July 22, 2016

Teaching English?

Chieh Huang, an Internet enterprenuer, once briefly taught English in Japan. Many years later, talking with a Japanese CEO of a gaming company, she asked him where he had lived. The Wall Street Journal quotes him: "I was like, oh it was countryside. She was like, no try me. I was like, Niigata. Her eyes lit up. She was like, I grew up there." I hope he did not infect Japanese children with that ugly, ignorant use of the word "like".

May 23, 2016

At Mahlerfest XXIX, Boulder Colorado, May 22 2016

Three composers and me: left to right, Ofer Ben-Amots, of Colorado College in Colorado Springs; in front of him, the charming Christa and her husband, Austrian composer Kurt Schwertsik; in the red shirt the guy who can't even read music; and Seattle's John David Lamb.

April 10, 2016

Back to the drawing board

For a year or so I've been expressing myself by using Facebook as a sort of twitter, keeping each item short because of the arbitrarily inconvenient Facebook format. But now I have lost my own Commonplace book, as well as tens of thousands of other files, thanks to a clumsy know-it-all who erased a hard disc, so I may as well post a blog now and then, even if nobody sees it.

William Gass, in his new collection of essays, Life Sentence: Literary Judgements and Acccounts, reflects on his own novel, The Tunnel, in which the protagonist excavates the Holocaust. Then Gass draws back with this:

I have taught philosophy in one or another of its many modes, for fifty years -- Plato my honey in every one of them -- yet many of those years had to pass before I began to realize that evil actually was ignorance -- ignorance chosen and cultivated -- as he and Socrates had so passionately taught; that most beliefs were bunkum, and that the removal of bad belief was as important to a mind as a cancer's excision was to the body it imperiled.

Just thought I'd toss that into the wilderness.

November 15, 2015

Still learning to use Facebook

I have now made my Facebook page "public" so the link below will work for a billions of people. Duhhh...

July 29, 2015

Hiatus here

As far as I know, not many people look at this blog, and I don't get around to writing much here anyway, so I am going to write whatever I want to write on my Facebook timeline. As irritating as Facebook can be, it is where I keep track of friends and family, so they will see whatever I write. Any other interested parties should go to https://www.facebook.com/dcmusicbox. Happy landings!

July 24, 2015

"It's MY couch."

(I can do cute animals as well as anyone.)

July 21, 2015

Attention must be paid

On this day in 1969 I was stuck in a motel in Oconomowoc, where my car had broken down. I thought there was something wrong with the TV: fuzzy picture, sound like a taxi radio. All of a sudden I realized guys were walking on the moon.

July 20, 2015

My rant for the day

Received today in an email from a dear friend:

It is a slow day in a little Greek Village. The rain is beating down and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a rich German tourist is driving through the village, stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner that he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one room in which to spend the night. The owner gives him some keys and, as soon as the visitor has gone upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to pay his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel. The guy at the Farmers' Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks bill at the taverna. The publican slips the money along to the local prostitute drinking at the bar, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer him her services on credit. The hooker then rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note. The hotel proprietor then places the €100 note back on the counter so the rich German will not suspect anything. At that moment the German comes down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, says the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money and leaves town. No one produced anything -- no one earned anything -- but the whole village is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism. And that, folks, is how the Greek government hopes to fix its economic problems.

=================

A cute story, and I sympathize with everybody in it. There are a number of curious aspects.

First of all, this is how the world works: money itself is worthless, good only for the commerce it makes possible. (Gold was always worthless: you can’t eat it or wear it or burn it to keep warm.)

Secondly, there is the great god Growth, that everybody wants; nobody ever asks, How can every country achieve growth at the same time? Doesn’t it always have to be at somebody else’s expense? In order to have growth, somebody has to buy our junk. At the mall I sell scented pencils made in China, probably toxic if a kid chews on them, and a lot of other junk in what used to be a bookstore. This is progress? This is growth? Capitalism seems to be all we’ve got, but it has a dark side.

Thirdly, how come the Germans have so much money? Partly because they have unions. In a capitalist country, which is the only kind that works as far as we know, you have a tripartite economy, like a three-legged table: the stock market and the big banks and corporations to run the economy, labor unions and other pressure groups to protect the masses, and the government to keep an eye on it all, adjudicating when necessary. In this country we have kicked one leg away, and the table has fallen over; in Germany the unions are an integral part of the nation.

July 19, 2015

It's the kitchen's turn

New floor, rearranging the cabinets... I can't tell you how proud I am of my son. Okay, he was inspired as a toddler by watching me put up a shelf or whatever, but he's gone screaming past any ability I ever had as a handyman. There's nothing he can't do. Once upon a time he handed me a tool; now I'm the one who does the fetching.

July 19, 2015

A blast from the past, in Colorado Springs

Once upon a time there were 1800 Tastee-Freez outlets in the USA; now there are fewer than 50 original locations. And there's one in Colorado Springs, spelled Tasty-Freeze. Dunno what that's about; maybe some of the original franchises have gone independent. But this one has great burgers, terrific fries, chocolate malts... miles better than McDonald's or Burger King or Wendy's. We're going back soon.

July 10, 2015

Every day, a hundred small insults

Today in my spam file there's an email with the subject line "Hey, You Won a $50.00 Sams Club Gift Card". (We go to Costco, but we have nothing to do with Sams Club.) Then I am asked to take part in a 30-second survey for a chance to win a $50.00 gift card.

How many morons help them with their marketing on the strength of a false statement? Quite a number, no doubt.